Bio

I was ﻿b﻿orn in the capital of Transylvania. Fleeing communism, my parents bravely set out as political refugees to Athens, Greece, where our walks in the park were literally through the ancient ruins of the Acropolis. My folks worked hard, saved up, and we hopped the pond to the United States in 1990, where we began our new lives in the metropolitan wonder that is Twin Falls, Idaho. We quickly moved up to Seattle and have loved it here ever since.

﻿My dad got into games, ﻿and I followed! He's been my best art teacher, and my mom is my encouraging critic. I'm always looking for an opportunity to learn something new, work with creative people, improve at art, and see neat places with my freckly wife and our sweet baby.

Concept Art

Art Direction

From early pre-production to the post release DLC content, I worked with team leads to establish creative goals, and set visual standards to match our high technical bar. My main focus was to reach a high level of collaboration to achieve a cohesive game experience. I had to gel with an established team, learning and harnessing the strengths of the individual contributors, while identifying areas of improvement and providing artistic direction, personal coaching, team building, as well as recruiting and hiring. From early on, I concentrated on coordinating with all non-artistic departments, and asking the hard questions about the game-design, story, and world-rules, because without truly understanding the IP, none of us could deliver a strong enough performance to have the final game be better than the sum of its parts. I worked across all departments to varying degrees of depth and detail, while maintaining a high-level view of the game's state and implementing clear and informed art direction and processes. The best part of working at Sucker Punch is collaborating with the truly talented, hard-working and kind people who I've learned so much from over the past few years. A large part of my role as the art director was to help get each individual's creative horsepower to the ground and finding ways to empower the team to contribute to their full potential, regardless of their position.

Below is a breakdown of my contributions as Art Director to each of the art departments on the project.

Hero DesignTackling the visual design of the main character, Delsin Rowe, was one of my first tasks on Second Son, and it's an endeavors I handled directly. This character is a person with extraordinary powers, but he's not a "super hero", he needed to fit in our believable world. I reached a good balance between a distinct costume design that elevates him above normal pedestrians, while also grounding him in the northwest, and reflecting his rebellious, artistic personality. Also taken into consideration were opportunities for character customization that would allow for some player choice but not sacrifice Delsin's distinct design and personal aesthetic. It took some iteration to find that balance and get the design approved, because Delsin was not only a new IP-front-man for inFamous, but he'd be part of the PS4 launch marketing (appearing on magazine covers and the PlayStation 4 box itself). So, from my initial rough sketches and visual exploration, to the final concept illustrations, all the way through overseeing him to model complete, Delsin was a personal project I put a lot of pride and investment in.

﻿Concept Lead﻿Note that these are not my concept illustrations below, but a small cross-section of the work contributed by the concept artists I helped recruit for Second Son. I led the concept team in designing a full cast of characters and game-play appropriate enemies, a variety of interesting city districts, including sci-fi structures correlating to new and distinctive elemental super powers, marketing illustrations, lighting conditions, weapons and props, story boards, visual mock-ups and endless paint-over-corrections and variations on all of the above; and all that delivered in a timely fashion, supporting the other art teams. My goal was to drive freshness and creativity and create own-able aesthetics, while supporting and enhancing the game tone and storytelling. To achieve this, I strove to give concise guidance that balances my creative direction with the needs of the game design, and carved out room for the artists to contribute to the design in areas that surprise me. Setting up, reacting to, and harnessing these happy surprises allows us to capture the most interesting solutions to even the most entangled aesthetic problems, benefiting from the very best creative sparks of every team member.

CharactersCharacter design was an interesting challenge on Second Son as I helped design and supervised the ideation, creation and implementation of all characters throughout production. The setting is real-world, contemporary, so it's very easy for things to look "off" or cartoony, and at the same time, it was critical that none of the characters fell flat visually. My goal was to make each character recognizable, believable, and in any way possible, reflect the power set they were known for. Each character has their own colorway and special insignia built into their role and attitude-appropriate attire to enforce the feel of a grounded super hero. The enemies were built around strict game-play guidelines, including AI behavior, player visibility, class distinction and faction affiliation. The opposing force, the Department of Unified Protection, is a fictional, anti-super-power force, staffed exclusively by super-powered combatants "fighting fire with fire". Their uniforms and tactics had to be designed to seem as realistic as possible, yet allow for the super natural flair they exhibit. We endowed them with a sense of authenticity by referencing real-world gear and weaponry, and designing an entire brand for their organization, including, logos, seals, rank patches, vehicle liveries, propaganda materials and even specific fonts and a warning-sign inspired color scheme. Most importantly, however, I worked with the design, animation, effects, sound, and cinematic teams to ensure the visual design of the characters reflected and enhanced game-play and story alike, pushing the technical limits in ways that helped us achieve believable end results.

EnvironmentsI worked closely with the environment team, striving to maintain a unique aesthetic while taking on the plentiful challenges that come with building a huge open world game. Our primary goal was to capture the essence of Seattle visually, while adhering to the design constraints we all agreed upon early: above all else, the city is an urban playground for the player's fantastic super powers. It was important to achieve a cohesive look for our city, yet it was crucial to push for distinct feelings for all of the different neighborhoods, in order to help the player navigate and feel like they're progressing. Sprinkled throughout the city, you'll find real-life nods to Seattle in the form of historic land marks and businesses painstakingly recreated. Layered on top of all that, the city is under martial law, so every corner is dotted with military check points that had to be designed to look highly mobile and completely destructible. Furthermore, as the game progresses, the streets and buildings are manipulated with the enemies concrete powers, causing strange geometric aberrations unique to our universe.

EffectsThe true stars of an inFamous game are the super powers. Alongside a deep technical investment, my goal was to create not just gorgeous visuals for the four separate power-sets Delsin uses, but more importantly, powers that made the player feel powerful. Taking visual inspiration from light writing, digital distortion artifacts, and fighter jet after burners, each individual power was designed holistically along side the game-play, animation, sound, and of course, our talented effects lead, to ensure the play-experience felt greater than the sum of its parts. I contributed to these strike team meetings, providing reference and ideation, concepts and paint-overs, reviews, and game-play test feedback. Navigating countless technical hurdles in the form of proprietary tools, untested hardware, real-time performance, and ever changing user feedback, I always strove to keep our focus on the emotional resonance we wanted to have with the player. We authored every single power to feel unmistakable for one another, yet maintained a cohesion among each set. We created grounding rules for the game world's powers, and still pushed each set's aesthetics to look and feel unique. Without compromising our bar of unmatched artistic beauty and technical spectacle, we achieved our ultimate goal of handing the player dynamic, memorable powers that were ultimately a joy to use. Surfing the technical challenges and unknown strengths of the tools and rendering techniques used to create our signature effects, took a certain ability to guide while also letting go and allowing the art and tech go where it wanted to. This was one of the most enjoyable parts of the game to work on.

Cinematics Sucker Punch made a big investment on the technical side of cinematics. From cutting edge vertex-streaming-based facial animation, driven in real time by facial tracking, done simultaneously with the on-stage body motion capture, to the various proprietary shaders designed to push the realism of characters' life like appearance, it was a colossal undertaking. That's why it was important to me that the artistic investment be equally high. On every single marketing trailer, game-play demo, and every cinematic in between, I worked with our lighting, editing, animation, and cinematic leads, to ensure that the characters and environments looked the best that they could within our typically aggressive schedules. I would pitch in with alternative storyboards, shot by shot paint-overs, and sometimes daily reviews to ensure the process of cinematic beautification supported the story-telling and was being enhanced equally by every department who's assets made an appearance in the most-viewed parts of the game.

Lighting and Tech.Working closely with the Tech Art Director, the goal was to discover and push the limits of the new PS4 hardware. It started with prioritizing features the programming team would build, that would best help sell our version of Seattle and the realistic human characters. I am not a technical person by any stretch, so I would communicate my goals through concept, found art and on-going corrective paint-overs to push the visual bar. The idea was "decorate" what is more or less a real city by bathing it in moody and colorful lighting, adding textural interest through rich reflections and wetness, and infusing as much ambient motion as possible into every scene with procedural wind, atmospheric effects, and animated wildlife etc. While the execution of these tasks is highly technical, and out of my area of expertise, I was directly involved with the application and aesthetic treatment of all these elements, to achieve the bar-setting, hyper realistic, filmic look the game has been acclaimed for.

Graphic ArtThe inFamous games have always featured a pre-rendered 2D animated story-telling component. It was critical to me that as the real-time game visuals progressed with the PS4's considerable renderingpower, the pre-rendered 2D component had to progress intellectually to feel as though the game had evolved as a whole. The idea was to depart form the comic book aesthetic present in the PS3 titles and adopt a more sophisticated and artistically iconic street-art influence, that would be an extension of the new protagonist. Through his screen-printed outfit, spray painting mechanic, urban art-inspired UI and the animated-graffiti cinematics, Delsin's point of view and personal touch could be felt throughout the product. It even inspired the box art and marketing assets. After initially developing the graffiti direction along side the motion-graphics team, I provided weekly cinematic reviews and editing notes, paint-overs and concept sketches, logos and emblem designs, UI supervision, and art direction throughout. Like the 2D cinematics themselves, working on this part of the project was a good palette cleanser, and gave me an opportunity to think very differently, taking on a completely other challenges than real-time 3D.

AnimationI worked closely with the animation team to ensure movements felt dynamic, on-character, and believable. Participating in strike-teams, I provided ideas and sketches on everything from Delsin's signature super power moves to enemy behaviors. I also focused a good portion of my animation time toward cinematic trailer reviews. The Sucker Punch animation team is comprised of very talented senior contributors, allowing for a light touch in the form of speedy feedback sessions on a weekly basis.

Visual BrandingI supervised all visual branding efforts, internal and external, from advertisements and merchandise, to the game box and live action commercial. I set high level artistic goals for our branding, while adhering to concrete marketing targets coming from various stake holders. I gave creative briefs to all of our external partners, and kept marketing-art-related communication open between SCEA and SCEE, Sony Creative Services and a number of freelance vendors. Everything from high level art direction on the key-art, all the way to minor edits for convention materials and newspaper advertisements was touched by me, in the form of quick paint-over and notes for all parties involved. I became close with our excellent marketing team, and truly enjoyed collaborating with everyone across the globe helping bring Second Son to market.

Expansion TitleAs part of the early creative direction group on the stand-alone PSN game inFamous First Light, I helped ideate character, plot, and game-play scenarios that could be broadly appealing to Second Son fans and new players alike. The biggest challenge was trying to compose a pitch that could realistically be accomplished in a compressed timeline and would allow us to utilize a large percentage of the existing assets we designed for the main game. As we had a smaller budget, all of the key art, logos and game box art was done in-house, and I worked closely with all the artists to drive a fresh and stylish take on branding assets that would gel with the established look of the game's predecessor.

Cinematic Direction

During my four years of directing cinematics on the Guild Wars franchise, my areas of responsibility included everything from pre-production ideation to final implementation of in-game 2D cut scenes, marketing videos, and game-play trailers. Initially I started by building a pre-rendered proof-of-concept, motion graphics test-cinematic to pitch the franchise transition from 3D cinematic into a 2D motion graphics format. This was both a strategic and stylistic change to side-step high-cost, low-return investment in ﻿expensive ﻿3D cinematic and marketing efforts, while utilizing the companies ability to attract amazing concept art illustrators. I was then responsible for recruiting and building a team of 10 people for the cinematic team, including illustrators, mo-graph animators, 3D animators and editors. As it was insisted that we maintain real-time rendering in the 2D cut scenes, to allow for custom player characters to appear integrated into the illustrated backdrops, I worked with programmers to design the basic functionality of a proprietary in-game 2D/3D motion graphics editor. Through production, I was responsible for team management, general scoping, final script edits, drawing all storyboards and directing the in game cinematics development. I was also tasked with directing, scoping, shooting and editing all game-play and marketing trailers, along with art directing various marketing assets for the box cover, key art, web site and merchandising. Additionally, I worked with external vendors to ensure graphic design and outsourced marketing materials were always on brand, including producing a full size art book.

Visual Branding Direction

Working very closely with the Art Director, on-staff concept illustrators, our web designer and several external vendors, I helped create and enforce the clean, hand crafted aesthetic of our games out-ward facing materials, including logos, print and digital advertisements and key art, merchandise and website design.

Art Instruction

Fu﻿t﻿u﻿r﻿ePoly is a digital arts training studio specifically geared toward video game development. Sharing decades of professional experience, we instructors offer a focused curriculum with an emphasis on real-world workflow solutions. With this pinpoint approach to education, serious students can quickly gain industry relevance. I've covered texture art and the introductory course to digital painting, and primarily focused on teaching the core principles of game concept art. Lessons are scheduled twice a week, at night, and the class size is about 20 students. I designed my own full-quarter lesson plan, and presented all classes, including the creation of in-class demos, homework projects, and pain-over critiques for students. Representing the school, I've taken part in a number of live online seminars and large-format speaking engagements (educational demos, press, portfolio reviews, recruiting). I also designed the compan﻿y logo. ﻿